The Survivors
by Right What Is Wrong
Summary: Obito escaped the cave rather than Kakashi. AU. Twoshot. Obito x Rin.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:** This does have a stretch bordering on a deus ex machina, but, to be fair, that's true of a lot of canon incidents involving the post-timeskip Sharingan anyway.

* * *

Obito and Rin make it out of the cave-in.

Kakashi doesn't.

Any ninja would say it was a horrible trade. Two lesser chuunin saved for one prodigious jonin - it's a disaster.

But, for the moment, they aren't ninja. They are two terrified children, and, though grieving for their teammate, they are desperately glad to be alive.

* * *

The next months push them hard.

Obito was a mediocrity, at least by the standards of his clan, but a Sharingan user must live up to the standard of his ability. A ninja could go very far, copying techniques. He even earned grudging praise from his fellow ninja.

But even in their praise was an undercurrent of resignation, of _Kakashi could have done better_.

 _Kakashi wouldn't need others' techniques._

 _Kakashi was the ninja we needed._

And the nightmares go further: they show him the boulder again and again, the obstacle he was too slow to divert, and say-

 _It should have been you instead_.

Rin has no such troubles, of course, though she grieves. (The dreams whisper to him about that, too: _Do you really think she'd weep so much, if it had been you?_ ) Konoha needs every medic it has. She barely has time even to grieve, much less fuss over survivor's guilt.

Obito envies her, a little. The grinding repetition of _it should have been you_ seems always to linger at the back of his mind, filling the empty space in his thoughts even when his head is full of techniques he copied and missions that must be fulfilled.

Their teacher would help, but his good intentions are ground down by his own life-and-death distractions: Minato Namikaze is becoming more god than man, and all worshippers know gods have little time for mortals. They have their own divine duties, clashing with other gods on great battlefields elevated above the normal muck and slaughter of war, and their performances become the stuff of song and story - while their petitioners choke to death on blood and dust.

If Obito could be a child, he might hate his teacher, a little.

But no Sharingan user is a child, in these times, and so he just accepts this as the life of a ninja.

If not for Rin, there would be days he wished he'd never enrolled in the academy at all.

* * *

"If not for Rin" becomes a reality very shortly.

Rin's kidnapped. Minato can't help - too busy with some other mission some other place very far away.

Isn't that too damn bad.

At this point, the nightmares don't matter. The doubts don't matter. His life doesn't matter.

He's seen too many comrades be killed like animals, and killed too many animals who were someone's comrades, to care any more. He'll save her or die trying.

Samurai say that the key attitude to hold while fighting is that you're already dead. Ninja tend to take a more pragmatic view, holding that corpses make poor soldiers, and advocating survival over valor.

Samurai seem to have the right of it.

At least, that's how he finds himself, eyes and muscles burning with exertion, knee-deep in corpses with Rin by his side. She looks at him with a face sick and terrified, and it makes him just want to go home, uncaring for village or duty, and lie down and never wake again.

Until she speaks, and he realizes that look's not directed at _him_.

She tells him what she is - what those monsters _made_ her. A sick joke, a ticking bomb - a monstrosity meant to kill the village of her birth, with her powerless to stop it.

"If you've ever been my friend, Obito," she says, her voice cracking, "you'll kill me."

He refuses - tells her it can't be the only option. They have sealing experts of their own - Minato's wife is both an Uzumaki _and_ a jinchuuriki, isn't that enough? If _anyone_ can fix it, she will. Rin just has to hold on. He'll get her back - he'll get her to a safe location, and send an emergency request for aid. Konoha won't see her dead - they can't. Being a jinchuuriki, even a booby-trapped one, is enough for them to ensure her safety, isn't it? She'll be fine, _she'll be fine_ -

But she's weeping, and his bloodied hands are slipping upon her arms, keeping her from going for her kunai, and even he can see her chakra fouling: some Kiri scum, somewhere, has seen that the trap has failed, and is detonating it early. Through the Sharingan's second-sight, Obito can even glimpse the shape of the beast waking within her.

That is one goddamned _ugly_ turtle.

As their heartbeats beat down to annihilation, he grits his teeth and looks her full in the face. If it ends here - he wants his last sight to be her face. "I _am_ your friend, Rin," he says, _his_ voice cracking, and focuses all his chakra upon his eyes.

They say Madara Uchiha could control the Tailed Beasts.

He's not Madara. He's not even a first-rate Uchiha. Still - it's not like Madara had anyone to teach _him_ , so it must be possible -

For a moment, he sees the horrible, sickly, gluttonous _thing_ in its cage, and, for one bright, clear, infinite instant, he holds its power in his hands, and he can subdue it, he _will_ , he _has_ to -

His world flashes white, then black, and opens upon an endless vista of pain.

He falls forever.

* * *

After an eternity of incoherent, all-devouring agony, he awakens to a world of darkness.

Shifting, shapeless shadows tell him the war has ended. Minato is Hokage. He is - in a way - a hero.

He cannot tell, at first, whether they are real or illusion. He would have been able to tell in an instant, once - but that is gone from him, now.

One eye can make out meaningless, blurred shapes, with the slightest tinge of color - they tell him he is lucky to have that. The other can make out nothing - it is gone. They tell him it burst within its socket, and was still running down his cheek when he was retrieved, limp and still as the dead.

He refuses to believe it - refuses to believe _anything_ they say, stripped of his ability to know whether this is a postwar Konoha or an interrogation room in some foreign village in which the war is very much _alive_ \- until someone comes running in, and wraps him in her soft-skinned arms and cries and sobs into his shoulder how happy she is that he's _alive_.

And he cannot even trust her because the voice is familiar.

He can trust her only because, after all these months dead to the world, he can still feel the beast within her.

* * *

A few months later, they see fit to release him. Or, more accurately, they have decided they can do nothing more for him.

His eyes, the pride of every Uchiha, are gone. If he attempts to use the remaining one, it will be almost certain to provoke a fatal seizure. Even awakening him took an experimental medication regimen to which he will have to hold fast for the rest of his life: to forsake it would lead to unconsciousness within hours at best, and at worst seizures, world-shattering migraines, and death. Even through the painkillers, he can feel a dull phantom pain where his eye should be, the demented signaling of what remains of his left optic nerve. They tell him it will be with him forever. He should be thankful it isn't worse.

He has burnt out his chakra network hopelessly; even the weakest jutsu brings sickening burning and leaves uncontrollable muscle spasms in its wake. They told him that it was almost as though he had opened the Gates, though in an untrained, uncontrolled way; for an instant, he must have achieved unfathomable power, but at a terrible price. He would have believed their supposed sympathy more had they not carefully, ever-so- _subtly_ begun pressing him for how he might have done it - and with such probing questions that, to a former copy ninja, it was obvious that they were seeking how it might be _replicated_. Sickened, he turned his face to the wall, lying and saying he hadn't the slightest idea.

 _Sharingan responds to the emotional requirements of the user_.

He heard that years ago, an ancient Uchiha saying that had fallen into disuse and incomprehension; in his youth, something an eternity ago, he took it to be a promise of Uchiha success and trained ever harder, thinking that, whenever he awakened his Sharingan, it would surely lead him down the path to becoming Hokage. He was such a child then - a little under a year ago.

Now his Sharingan is gone, and his career as a shinobi with it.

Even if he tried to resume his duties, blinded and chakra-burned as he is, his medications inhibit his reflexes to the point he stands not a chance in combat against shinobi; even a street-fight with a civilian would run the risk of failure. Though he still lives, to the world of ninja, he is dead. Worse than dead - he took resources that might have been devoted to those who still had a possibility of redeployment.

The longer he listened to those who tended to him, and perceived the words they left unspoken, the more his suspicion grew that they would have gladly left him to die, if not for Rin.

Not for her desperate pleading, nor for any obligation to a fellow medic-nin: but rather, because they feared what might occur if they allowed him to die. The inhibition he placed upon the Three-Tails still holds, and there is insufficient data, even among the Uchiha, to determine whether that would outlive him. So long as he lives, the Leaf has a second jinchuuriki. Else -

And so they shut him away in a spare, cramped apartment, a corpse they cannot bury, and give him a small stipend as their tribute to the dead. He is not exceptional, in that regard: the war chewed up many, spat them out, and, after a brief celebration of its glorious heroes, left them in the dust to rot. He is but one of many: a crippled, hobbled, half-blind old man at the august age of thirteen.

He has some happiness that others of his sort lack: he still has someone to visit him. Rin comes to him whenever she can make time, and together they sit and talk about life before the war. It was a nice time, then: full of sunshine and smiles and dreams, rich with petty rivalries and silly hopes, with no higher concerns than training and tests and competition.

By mutual unspoken consent, the name of the teammate they lost never passes their lips.

Their teacher's name arises less and less frequently; though the Hokage visited often at first, spouting platitudes and the placid wisdom of a man with a whole body and both eyes, his presence dropped off with time, the demands of his duties growing more and more. It's not important, anyway.

If he wasn't there when that one, the one whose name they will not utter, died - if he wasn't there when Rin was taken, and changed for life - what does it matter whether he's here _now_?

Time passes. Rin still comes, rain or shine; even when she's so tired she passes out on his couch (the one she helped him pick out, on a day when he could summon up the will to go outside), if she can make the time at all, she comes. He looks at her, a long, blurry shape of brown and pink against the off-white blob that is the couch, and drags up, from some depth within himself that his injuries have not touched, the will to at least _try_ to live.

It's the hardest thing he's ever done, perhaps even harder than that one surpassing instant when he achieved something far beyond his training and limits, and destroyed himself in the process; that was a lifetime's effort packed into one moment, and this is a terrible, dragging drudgery, an aching struggle that sees him silently shuffling through a village revolving around the life he can no longer live, past idiot children's gawking, and beyond his own overwhelming urge to shut his remaining eye upon a gray and formless world, lay his aching body down to rest, and sleep until the end of the world. One day he could manage with ease; a week he could endure with only a little resentment. But weeks become months, and as months turn into years, his sanity would snap if not for her.

(He sometimes wonders if it's the same for her; she never seems to have any other friends, and the only names she mentions are those of her colleagues and patients. There is still a bounce in her step and a smile in her voice, but something has changed from his memories; he cannot tell whether her sweetness and optimism truly survived the war, or whether there is only an ossified bedside manner, with nothing left beneath.)

Life becomes bearable again. He learns to find some scraps of happiness in the warmth of the sun on his face, the sounds of music, and the wind on his skin. Not enough to sustain him on their own, but enough that he can imitate a human existence, and make an effort for Rin.

* * *

They wed at fifteen, exchanging vows beneath a cherry tree shedding its blossoms.

The wedding is virtually unattended; some low-ranking Uchiha shows up at the beginning for the sake of clan solidarity, but swiftly finds an excuse to be elsewhere. The Hokage and his wife swore they would attend, but urgent business came up at the last moment - as ever. Obito's grandmother passed of old age at the start of the war, and Rin's parents on the battlefield; no one who might support them, despite all they have changed, remains.

Really, the only attendee is the ANBU tasked to keep an eye on Rin.

It doesn't matter. The world wasn't there for them when they desperately needed it, and they don't need the world now.

They have each other. The war is over. Despite everything, they're alive.

The terrified children who escaped that cave-in could ask for nothing else.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Originally, I had Obito and Rin marrying at seventeen. Unfortunately, then I looked up the canon timeline. That was a mistake. Nonetheless, I figured I would get fewer complaints if I followed canon and apologized for it later than if I shifted the timeline to better suit my ideas of progression.

I'll probably get complaints about making it so depressing, but the entire idea for this oneshot came from Obito using his Sharingan to subdue Rin's Tailed Beast. Unfortunately, short of time travel, there's no way to plausibly get Obito up to that level by the time of that event. Thus it had to be sheer shonen bullshit, and that must be paid off with a cost equal to the implausibility.


	2. Chapter 2

It remains that way until the night the Nine-Tails breaks free.

As they stagger out of bed and flee their apartment, ANBU come to greet them: first to confirm the Three-Tails is not breaking loose as well, then to verify Obito is in no shape to be puppeteering the attack (without chakra and without functioning eyes, he is still the only Uchiha to have controlled a Tailed Beast in recent times), and finally to take them both into isolation.

Not to safety, quite. Their priority is not the preservation of at least one jinchuuriki, and they do not dare deploy one Tailed Beast when the other is running wild; instead, they are focused on keeping Rin and her sealer away from any potential foe behind this disaster, lest the second step be to set free the Three-Tails and seal Konoha's fate.

And so they wait and tremble in darkness as the earth shakes, humiliated by their own impotence, and wonder if there will be a Konoha to come back to.

There is, when they are finally permitted to emerge. But, frankly, Obito is in better shape than it.

The weeks that follow are ugly ones. Many clans have lost members; several lesser ones were snuffed out. The infrastructure lies in ruins. Orphanages, still heavily laden by the war, now overflow with screaming children whose parents will never come. Civilian trade is disrupted; all ninja not in deep cover have been recalled, further damaging Konoha's wounded finances. Other villages send "aid" in what are insultingly obvious covers for espionage missions, the heartfelt attentiveness of vultures. It would be bad enough, if that single night had only been a microcosm of the war; instead, Konoha's sudden weakness threatens to birth on another.

Even what good news there is carries bitter irony. Obito finds himself the most popular of all Uchiha; in the turmoil and paranoia after the calamity, he alone has an ironclad alibi that night, and he alone is untouched by the suspicions that swirl around his entire clan. The instinctive suspicion of him rebounds, and suddenly they hold him up once again as a hero, the student of the late deified Minato, the Uchiha whose loyalty is unimpeachable and sacrifice for the village unquestionable.

(He thinks of telling them Konoha had stopped mattering to him at that point, and he did it all for Rin. He is not that foolish.

It was enough that, when Rin broke down one night and, through incoherent tears, apologized for all he had given up to save her, he had told her that he had done it for her sake, and would have done it again.)

Now the hopeless cripple is an emblem of what can be expected from all shinobi; he overhears the increasingly-common shouts that if Uchiha Obito could give up his sight and his body for the village, the people can give more of themselves for Konoha. He doesn't flatter himself that it's a natural sentiment. The same ANBU who took them to a safe site continue to monitor them, and an old man, with the mannerisms of a common villager, sidles up to him one day and asks him to kindly give a speech to raise morale.

He replies that the only speech he'd want to give would be to beg children not to become ninjas; if he thought they would listen, he'd have given it already.

He has it indicated to him that this would be an extremely bad idea, and he would be very well advised to give a speech to raise morale. If he were alone, he would do as he liked and damn the consequences; then again, if he were alone, he would have taken one look at the devastated Konoha and turned away, and at first laughed, then wept.

He is not alone. He does as he is told.

Rin can barely be with him in this time; every medic-nin left alive in working incessantly, and she returns to their tent (pitched in the middle of a ruined training-ground, along with a sea of others) only to sleep. He would have time to mind tht more if his newfound master did not see fit to run him like a dog. Obito Uchiha, symbol of proper shinobi sacrifice and Konoha's unbreakable spirit, tours daily the worst-affected areas and spouts wise platitudes and moving anecdotes of his own recovery, assuring the wounded and mourning boldly and vapidly that they, too, can find light after darkness. The more wide-eyed, the more hopeless, and the more desperate look to him, clinging to his artificial, carefully-scripted, spoon-fed speeches as though his words truly could lead them out of despair.

The entire village acknowledges him now. They hold up his name above all other Uchiha. No one remembers the name of Hatake Kakashi now, first one of many war dead, and now entirely swept aside by this new tide of death.

If he could go back and meet his twelve-year-old self, he would very calmly walk up to him, listen to him discoursing on all his dreams, and punch him squarely in the face.

Rin was the only one of those dreams that meant anything, in the end. Fittingly, she's the one that takes longest to come back to him, when at last Konoha is through the worst of the crisis and something like order is restored. For a few weeks, they do nothing but spend every single moment possible together, reaffirming that, no matter what the devastation, they still have each other.

Then there is another issue.

* * *

They know what the maiden name of the Hokage's - the _old_ Hokage, now that Saritobi has resumed his former duties - wife was, even if the rest of the village seems oblivious. They know when the seal on a female jinchuuriki weakens - they were told when they applied for permission to marry, and were granted it under the condition that they would never have children. They wonder, really, how most of the village thinks the old Hokage had a newborn infant, his umbilical cord freshly cut, so readily at hand, much less one with a shock of blond, bristly hair and a surname identical to that of the Hokage's wife.

Neither of them can quite fathom what failure of intelligence - either military or cognitive - has kept people from realizing, as clearly as though it was shouted from the rooftops in every ninja village in the land, that Uzumaki Naruto is Namikaze Minato's son. Konoha is a large village, and the rest is explainable as coincidence, but - did he _have_ to be given his mother's surname?

Nonetheless, they have not, and the information cannot be propagated: the child of the Yellow Flash, the last of the Uzumaki, and the jinchuuriki of the Nine-Tails together is too fantastic a target for enemy villages and missing-nins alike to resist. That's the excuse for permitting their ignorance.

Permitting his treatment, however, is another thing entirely.

The first either of them came across him was when Rin was treating injured children and came across an infant crying from dehydration, unheeded, and left to fester in his own filth.

After immediately rectifying the issues, she demanded immediately to know why no one had attended to him in the several hours he must have been in need. Her colleagues had avoided her eyes. It had taken a full three minutes - a long time, in that harried ward - for anyone to admit why.

To give their cowardice the slightest benefit of the doubt, perhaps they had suddenly grown worried what "Konoha's _tame_ jinchuuriki" (to use her new epithet in the propaganda lately pushed out) might do in a situation in which they urgently required medical attention, if they saw fit to admit they would not offer a jinchuuriki the slightest care if their situations were reversed. That may have had something to do with the way they hastily offered apologies, and swore it wouldn't happen again.

The second time was when Obito was visiting an orphanage, telling them all how even orphans could dream of one day being heroes of Konoha (and how that made him _sick_ ) when, in the middle of his speech, he had heard an infant wailing. It was not an uncommon sound; what was uncommon was the way nobody moved to attend to it.

Without his knowing it, his reaction would be the same as Rin's had been, and the reaction to him would be the same. And the promises of better treatment would be just as false.

After further encounters, and comparing notes, they come to the conclusion that someone has to act, and, with no one else assuming responsibility, the duty falls to them. Minato taught them and cared for them once, however he neglected them later; with the villagers doing their best to murder his son through sheer neglect, it's their duty to care for the child.

Damaged as they are, they are the last people who should be taking care of a child. But even they would be better for an infant than no one at all.

With the solemnity of people signing their own death-warrant, they submit their request to adopt him and wait for a response.

The old man comes to visit. For no other reason than appearances does he continue to appear a common villager; they both know he is not. He calmly inquires what might have made them decide to meddle in the affairs of the jinchuuriki of the Nine-Tails.

Rin hints their connection to the boy might be a different one.

He accepts that calmly and asks what might have given them that impression. Once Obito outlines it, he grunts and says "Hiruzen" always was a sentimental fool. (The Hokage will receive that part of their later report with a puff on his pipe and a comment that his esteemed colleague also remains unchanged. He will never actually name his "esteemed colleague"; nor does Obito even know his name, after taking orders from him for weeks.)

Nonetheless, he says, sentiment means nothing to shinobi. Do they have a better reason?

Indeed.

Lonely children love those who love them, Obito says. Raise a jinchuuriki without love, and his loyalties will go to the first person to show him kindness. If that person should not be from Konohagakure...

More than that, Rin says, a child deprived of the concepts of care, connection, or human contact during crucial developmental periods is unlikely to ever understand thoss concepts. If the boy grows up hated by the whole village, the concept of loyalty to the village might be wholly alien to him. An ordinary ninja so deprived might shirk from becoming missing-nin out of fear or lack of imagination; a jinchuuriki, and one with the blood of one of Konoha's greatest geniuses...

Still overly sentimental, the man says, but with some validity. He, however, has been forbidden from applying proper conditioning.

(The Hokage will comment dryly that he did indeed not wish for Minato's son to become accustomed to killing before he could read.)

Sentiment, Obito says, teeth on edge, is what made him a "hero", and got Rin back to Konoha alive.

The man says nothing. Something about his face, perhaps, makes Rin place a hand on Obito's arm and squeeze hard.

If he needs to be clinical, she says tightly, it's a choice between Naruto being raised to control the Nine-Tails, educated at home as well as the academy, and with firm loyalty to Konoha, or being left in ignorance, running wild, and without loyalty to anything in the world.

Without clear vision, Obito knows nothing except that, for a time, the man sits in silence. At last, he rises and departs, remarking only, without turning around, that deviation from what they have proposed will be seen and punished.

* * *

A week later, they have the boy in their arms.

As Rin places the child into the crib - the first decent bedding the infant has ever known - Obito puts an arm around her shoulders and looks down at the yellow-and-pink blur before them.

 _Do you think we'll be enough?_

He turns and looks her in the face. For a moment, he feels a pang that he cannot see her features, even staring her in the eye; it's all right, though. He has the memory.

Her face was the last thing he ever really saw.

 _We'll have to be enough._


End file.
